Top 4 Innovative Charity PR Campaigns

As a PR agency, we know that a successful PR campaign can make all the difference between generating mediocre and great coverage for a client. What’s even better is utilising a range of digital mediums and creating PR campaigns to spread the word on charity initiatives. The combination of social media, blogs and accumulated news sources is the perfect formula for bringing in user impressions and easily enabling campaigns to become viral.

Here is our list of top 4 innovative charity PR campaigns that have soared and gone above and beyond in terms of innovative marketing and PR:

1. Batkid Saves San Francisco

Make-A-Wish Foundation put together one of the biggest searched campaigns of 2013. Miles Scott, a 5 year old leukaemia patient, had the wish to be Batkid. With the help of City of San Francisco, Make-A-Wish granted his request.

The city was completely transformed as streets and buildings turned into Gotham overnight. When everything had been prepared, the scenario “Batkid saves the city” went into motion. With the help of an avalanche of social media blasts, this grand scheme drew in thousands of onlookers, million of tweets and an astounding amount of mainstream media coverage. Not only did Batkid save the damsel in distress at Hyde and Green Streets, but he saved the burgled bank vault at 550 Montgomery Street and a hamburger to eat at Union Square. This grabbed people’s attention and all for the right reasons.

2. To Mama With Love

Epic Change is a non-profit organisation which supports grassroots activists. For Mother’s Day, they launched a campaign named “To Mama With Love”. This consisted of setting up an online map of the world, encouraging people from around the world to upload photos of their mothers. As a result, this created a landing page in which funds could be raised in support of female activities in Nepal, Tanzania and Afghanistan.

The campaign took in a bit over $16, 000 and had over 300 fundraising pages created. This was a great campaign as it provided people with a different approach to thinking about Mother’s Day and greatly benefited those in need.

3. Water Is Life #firstworldproblems

Water is Life executed a ingenious initiative called “#firstworldproblems””. This proved to be a firsthand example of hashtag hijacking done extremely well. For those who don’t know, #firstworldproblems are a series of popular memes and tweets which shed comedic light on Western society’s small day-to-day problems, which is hardly anything compared to real world issues happening around the world.

The first video campaign featured victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquakes reading tweets of the popular #firstworldproblems hashtag in admirable fashion, emphasising to us that there are a lot more serious and important problems in the world around us. The video was innovative as it identified a viral online trend and applied it to a real life situation. They simply presented a familiar idea to people and used it as a vessel to make people aware of the other – innovative or what? This campaign was quite successful as it resulted in over 6 million views on Youtube.

4. Hands Across The Water Appeals to Ewan McGregor

One of the more recent campaigns this year is by Hands Across the Water . They thought Ewan McGregor was brilliant in film “The Impossible” and what better way to share about the charity’s work before the 10 year anniversary of the tsunami with a video? This will hopefully lead to Ewan McGregor and some big names to share the great work that Hands Across the Water has done, and most importantly, the work they will continue to do in the future.

Feel free to spread the word about this amazing charity and appeal to Ewan McGregor on Twitter with the hashtags #EwanMcGregor and #lendahelpinghand !